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Voxel
Voxel or Volumetric Pixels, is a term that refers to the cubes that are used to construct all the material in EverQuest Next Landmark. The game's editing tools allow players to place and remove voxels of varying sizes. A smaller voxel is known as a Micro-Voxel. Additional tools allow players to smooth, shape, and otherwise customize these voxels. Voxels also uniquely allow for the active destruction of material into its component pieces on the fly, a significant component of both Landmark and EverQuest Next. World Voxels There is a 3-dimensional grid over the Landmark world, and the cubes this grid forms are one type of voxel. This is what you see when you use the Selection Tool . These voxels cannot be modified by players. Rendered Voxels When you use the Add Tool, a rendered voxel takes the shape of the world voxel the tool is used on. The rendered voxel can be deformed, and this makes them useful for building various shapes. These are the voxels you see in the world. Anatomy A rendered voxel has 12 sides. When not deformed, it's a cube, but each side is rendered as two triangles. The division into triangles follows a line from the top-south-east to the bottom-north-west of the rendered voxel, so on the north and south side it's divided from the top east to the bottom west. A rendered voxel can be assigned exactly one material, and the material contributes to the texture for all visible sides of the rendered voxel. Materials for adjacent voxels may contribute as well, and when they do it is called blending. Air can be considered a material that is not rendered. Modification Each rendered voxel shares sides and corners with adjacent rendered voxels. If you modify the right side of one rendered voxel, you modify the left side of the rendered voxel to its right. When a copied voxel is rotated 90 degrees and pasted, the corners of the rendered voxel it is pasted over move to match the rotated corners of the rendered voxel that was copied, but the triangles will always be divided top-south-east to bottom-north-west. This means that a rendered voxel's shape is not preserved after rotation. When you use the Subtract Tool on a rendered voxel it usually only changes the material to air. There is an exception where the top-south-east corner of a voxel resets to the corner of the associated world voxel when deleted. As this only affects this corner it is presumed to be a bug. A rendered voxel's material can be changed to any material except air by the Paint Tool, but this does not affect it's shape. More information about Basic Voxel Editing is available. Limitation Each corner of a rendered voxel is associated with a corner of a world voxel. A corner of a rendered voxel cannot move more than 1/2 the width of a world voxel from that corner of the world voxel along any cardinal or vertical axis. One way to visualize this and to determine if a shape can be formed on a wall is to draw a grid and place one dot in each box, then connect those dots to dots in the four adjacent boxes with a straight line segment. If you can draw the shape this way, then it can be represented in voxels. The corners of the world voxels would be in the center of these boxes. In this two dimensional analogy, a Micro-Voxel is a voxel whose four corners are near the same corner of this grid. In three dimensions the same analogy applies, but must be considered from two sides. Notably, this means that there are some shapes that a rendered voxel cannot take, such as to have a top corner 1/3 of a world voxel's width from the bottom of the voxel. It is however possible to extend the top corner of the rendered voxel below it up 1/3 of a world voxel's width. This affects the implementation of the Line Tool. Variations Micro Voxel Micro-voxels behave like normal voxels but are much smaller. Anti Voxel Anti-Voxels is a term applied to a different number of techniques and imprinting that all involve creating and manipulating voxels that are partially air, and therefore appear smaller than a regular voxel along one side or face, but still have one or more side or face as normal voxel length or width. Therefore they appear thinner or smaller than a regular voxel, but still behave like a regular voxel along the side that is NOT thinner or smaller. Anti-Voxel etching is the technique that uses the creation of a partial-air shape to embed air into a regular voxel and thus create an "etched" form. Anti-Voxel strings and shapes are voxels that have been manipulated so that they possess enough air that they are compressed along one axis and still the same length as a regular voxel along one or more axis. Zero Data Voxel Zero Data voxels have no presence, or in other words are defined by the absence of an adjacent rendered voxel. These only exist in the clipboard when copied from procedurally generated terrain or voxels that have been healed using the Heal Tool. When painted, they become regular voxels in nature. When pasted they make no modification to existing voxels. Zero Data voxels are very useful when making inlays or pasting items without the accompanying air. Zero Volume Voxel Rendered voxels that have no volume. These voxels do have a material that can blend with adjacent voxels, they are often invisible from some or all angles, and they do deform adjacent voxels when pasted. If another voxel is pasted or added next to one of these voxels, the zero volume voxel may be deformed in a way that gives it a volume (thus no longer being a zero volume voxel). Category:Technology Category:Building Category:Voxel